Althusser argues that there are important philosophical differences between the early Marx who was very influenced by Hegel (e.g. in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) and the later Marx of works like Capital. He argues, in fact, that an indisputable epistemic shift occurred in Marx’s thinking, leading to a radical rethinking and rejection of the idealist pretensions of Hegelianism in all its forms.
Hegel’s Idealist Philosophy of History and Expressive Model of the Social Totality
In his The Philosophy of History, Hegel argued that the physical and spiritual worlds are not separate from but, rather, inextricably intertwined with each other in that the physical or material universe expresses or manifests Geist or Reason or Spirit (Hegel’s word for God or the spiritual force that animates and pervades the universe or even Universal Mind). Indeed, the latter needs the former in order to realise itself (i.e. come to know and thus perfect itself). (M. H. Abrams points out in The Mirror and the Lamp that where the dominant trope by which cosmologists traditionally sought to conceptualise the relation by which this world is linked to the next is the mirror, in the nineteenth century this changed. The universe came to be conceptualised as something akin to a lamp, spirit ‘shining’ forth through the ‘bulb’ of the material universe.) In other words, Geist or Spirit needs to express itself in material form in order to come to know itself. The most important medium for so doing is the consciousness of humans. It is significant that Hegel uses the word ‘geist’ to denote the individual’s mind as well. From this point of view, the soul / intellect of each human is, as it were, a small part of Spirit or Reason as a whole. As a result, the spiritual / intellectual growth of each human contributes to the growth of Spirit / Reason in its entirety. From this point of view, therefore, the mind or consciousness or soul of each human being precedes and is not the product of material existence.
As a result, according to Hegel, as human civilisation develops, so does Spirit perfect itself. The history of human civilisation is synonymous with the growth towards perfection of Spirit or Reason. It is, as such, viewable in terms of a progression culminating in the perfection of, in Hegel’s view, Enlightenment Germany. The history of humankind up to this time is divisible into three broad stages, each of which is dominated by a particular Zeitgeist (or ‘spirit of the age’). That is, each stage is the expression of one particular aspect of Spirit to the exclusion of other aspects. History progresses dialectically: each stage (thesis) gives way to its antithesis in which opposing qualities of Spirit are manifested. These are both subsumed, however, in a third stage (synthesis) in which the best qualities of both the preceding stages are assimilated before the dialectical process is repeated all over again. In Hegel’s scheme of things, the ancient Asian world (China, India, Persia) gave way to its antithesis, classical European civilisation (Greece and Rome) the best parts of which were synthesised by modern European civilisation. European history itself advanced dialectically: the long, dark night of Feudalism during which the Catholic church held sway was succeeded by the Protestant Reformation. The best features of the two were combined to produce the Enlightenment which reached its zenith in the French Revolution (notwithstanding its bloody excesses) and the democratic legacy it bequeathed to Western Europe. It is in this way that humankind (and, by extension, Spirit) draws ever nearer to perfection. (For a fuller but clear explication of Hegel’s ideas, see Peter Singer’s Hegel.)
Hegel makes use of an organic metaphor or model which philosophers term the expressive totality in order to conceptualise the relationship of Spirit to any given society. Within Hegel’s idealist schema, each place and time (for example, the U.S.A. during the so-called ‘roaring twenties’) is conceptualised in terms of a ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘Spirit of the Times,’ that is, as a particular expression or manifestation of Spirit. The essence ‘expressed’ by everything material in any society is Spirit. This is why some speak of the ‘organic unity of society”: all the various parts express the whole of which they are part as much as the whole depends for its very existence on the parts which comprise it. For Hegel, paradoxically, the phenomenal diversity of society is reducible to a noumenal unity in that all its component parts, even those that seem to be in conflict with each other, are thought to ‘express’ Spirit as it manifests itself at one moment of its development. Indeed, from a larger perspective, all the different societies which comprise the world form part of the totality of Spirit which expresses its multiple aspects in and through these various societies.
Marxism
Marx’s stated desire was to ‘turn Hegelianism on its head,’ as it were. Marx was a materialist, that is, he believed that reality is not a mental phenomenon but a material one (i.e. it is reality which shapes our consciousness and not the other way around). He was of the view that this physical world is neither the reflection of some spiritual world beyond the physical nor the material expression of Spirit or God. The physical world is, rather, all there is. There is, therefore, nothing beyond death. As such, the history of humanity is not tantamount, as Hegel claimed, to the progressive self-realisation of Spirit in matter. Human society has developed not as the result of some divine plan but contingently, that is, in response to the sheer necessity of ensuring the physical survival and, thus, meeting the physical needs of its inhabitants. Marx offers at least two indispensable tools for the explication of the history of human civilisation: what has come to be known as the Base / superstructure model of society and a dialectical (but materialist) model of history.
‘Vulgar’ Marxism: the ‘Mechanical Causality’ Model of the Social Formation:
The Base / superstructure model functions as something akin to a template that can be theoretically imposed upon any given culture in order to understand the society peculiar to a particular place and time. It represents the very structure of any society (which can be divided into two levels) at any given moment of history. According to Marx’s famous (if somewhat crude) architectural metaphor, any society at any given period of human history may be conceptualised as consisting of two levels: the Economic Base and the political / ideological Superstructure. The Base is Marx’s term for the economic infrastructure or foundation of the society in question. By the economic base, Marx means the distribution of resources in a given community, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services. The Base may in turn be subdivided into a) the means of production (the geographical circumstances, the raw materials and the technology available at that stage of history–the plough and land during the Middle Ages, for example, as opposed to the factory), b) the forces of production (the nature of the labour force available), and c) the social relations of production attendant on or appropriate to the particular configuration taken by the forces and means of production. By social relations of production, Marx means the division of that society into classes–some people, for example, own the land or the factories as opposed to others who merely work for these owners, etc.–which results in the asymmetrical distribution of economic wealth and, thus, power.
The Superstructure, on the other hand, is comprised of a) various social institutions or practices (to wit, a dominant form of political administration [the state], a specific legal code and justice system, the church and other religious organisations, academic establishments [schools and universities] and artistic and cultural practices), and b) the political, moral, religious, political, legal, philosophical, educational and aesthetic ideologies or theories that correspond to these institutions (in other words, the ideas that predominate in these respective areas). Both the institutions and their concomitant ideologies subtend the interests of the ruling class. In this model, the Base determines or shapes everything to be found in the Superstructure which, consequently, ought to be viewed as a reflection of the Base. To put this another way, economics is the cause of all the components of the superstructure which are the effects of the economy. From this point of view, precisely because all ideologies are ultimately traceable to (since they are determined by) the class-division of the society in question, many Marxists speak of ideology as reduceable in the final analysis to its class determinants. The charge of economic reductionism is often directed at Marxism, that is, the tendency to reduce everything other than the economic to economic factors. Hence, the following schematic representation of the Base/Superstructure model:
SUPERSTRUCTURE
- Ideologies
- Social Institutions (the most important being the State)
————————————————————————————————————
ECONOMIC BASE
-
Social Relations of Production (SROP)
- Forces of Production (FOP)
- Means of Production (MOP)
Historical Materialism is the term often used to describe Marx’s model of history in order to differentiate it from Hegel’s idealist model. According to Marx, the history of humankind (he is really talking about the history of Europe) is divisible into successive stages but these are not viewable as part and parcel of the progressive self-realisation of Spirit in matter. Historical change derives from changes in the way that human beings conspire to ensure their continued physical existence upon Earth. As a result, each stage of history corresponds to a particular Economic Mode of Production (this is the ‘base’ of any society), that is, it is differentiated by the peculiar way in which the physical needs of its inhabitants are met and the specific nature of the social relationships which are associated therewith. For example, during the earliest stages of history, mankind survived largely by hunting. Later, humans learned to grow food and herd animals. In each case, there is a definite economic mode of production at stake: the former society is predicated largely upon hunting and gathering, the latter upon agriculture and husbandry. History, Marx argues, progresses dialectically: each stage sows the seeds of its own undoing because, as Marx puts it, the Forces of Production (the nature of the labour force) ‘comes into conflict’ with the extant Mode of Production.
Hegelian Marxism: the ‘Expressive Totality’ Model:
The revelation in the early twentieth century of the existence of some hitherto undiscovered, because unpublished, writings by Marx called theEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts(written in 1844) encouraged Marxists to rethink the precise nature of the Base / Superstructure model along lines inspired by Hegel. In them, the influence of several indentifiably Hegelian concepts (e.g. ‘alienation’) on Marx is particularly noticeable. The Hegelianism of the early Marx was in turn very influential upon twentieth century Marxists like Georg Lukács and is particularly evident in his seminalHistory and Class Consciousness(1922). Other noted Hegelian Marxists include Walter Benjamin and the members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc.)
Lukács claims that it was the “category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts” (27) which was the “essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel” (27). He states inThe Historical Novelthat his desire is, like Marx’s, to translate the “whole mysticism of the ‘spirit’ into materialist historical reality” (119). In the Marxist scheme of things, accordingly, the essence expressed by all the elements which comprise the social ‘totality’ is evidently not spiritual but material in nature. To be precise, it is economics (rather than Spirit or Reason) which constitutes the totality and which is expressed by all the other parts. Tony Bennett puts it this way inFormalism and Marxism:
clash between the dynamic momentum of new forces of economic production and the restraining hand of old social relations of production. This essential clash is then said to be present in, and therefore capable of being deduced or read off from, each of the constituent parts which, taken together, comprise the social totality. (40)
In other words, all the elements which comprise a given social totality have in common and, thus, ‘express’ the ‘economic essence’ of that totality which subsumes the means, forces, and social relations of production, the last element–the class structure–being arguably the most important of these.
Hegelian Marxists argue that it is the inevitable conflict between these classes which constitutes the essential contradiction at the centre of any social totality which is a dynamic phenomenon caught up in the dialectical development of human history and, thus, always in the throes of conflict and change. To be precise, each social totality is comprehensible as a function of its location along the dialectical sequence of the economic modes of production that constitute history. Each stage or thesis (e.g. feudalism) gives way to its antithesis (capitalism) which in turn will give way to a third stage (communism) which will synthesise the best features of both the thesis and antithesis. The motor driving this change is the process by which improvements in the means of production (e.g. improved industrial technologies) and accompanying alterations in the forces of production (e.g. the consequent need for a smaller workforce) come into conflict with the prevailing social relations of production necessitated by obsolete modes of production (e.g. the existence of large masses of labourers) that prevail at that stage of history. Out of this essential contradiction or conflict at the heart of and expressed by all parts of the social totality arises historical change. What this usually translates into is a conflict between the ruling class fighting, on the one hand, to maintain its economic, social, and political dominance by keeping control over the ever-changing means and forces of production and, on the other hand, the ruled classes who sometimes struggle merely to exist in an environment in which they are subjected to the whims of market forces entirely beyond their control or at least to change an unfair status quo in which they are marginalised and exploited, or sometimes even to attain social ascendancy. It is from this point of view that every element within a given social totality ‘expresses’ what Lukács terms the ‘world-historical forces’ pertinent to that time and place.
